“Epic… Astonishing… Page-turning… Unforgettable” (Entertainment Weekly). A book that is not easily forgotten; Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing. The story of two family lines originating with two West african step sisters separated because of the slave trade in the mid 1700s. One line is sent to the deep south of the United States while the other remains in West Africa. This book challenges the ordinary thought process towards African and African American history as described in African History: A Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone, “... the idea of Africa was initially fashioned not by Africans but by non-Africans, as a ‘paradigm of difference’. Africa, in other words, has served as an exotic prism through which outsiders, mainly
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Generally, African history is taught as though it is very distant from the history that the majority finds to be the most important, teaching the slave trade as statistics; simply numbers, not real people. We learn of the hardship and torture people endured but without context into who these people were, because they were real people, it all means nothing. To counter this way of teaching, Gyasi does what schools do not and personalizes every character which brings the history to life, giving it meaning beyond simply numbers or words on a page, “When they sold Ness in 1796… Ness could remember reaching out for her mother, flailing her arms and kicking her legs, fighting against the body of the man who'd come to take her away” (Ness, Gyasi). Having previously established Ness as a character with a very complex history, we as readers already have a connection with her so when she is sold and forced to leave her mother as a child, it has a greater impact than reading that slaves were sold as children in some history textbook. Another aspect that is often overlooked and dismissed is the fact that Africa had more of an impact of the people of the imperialist countries of Europe than many would ever know, “That man came from the Cape Coast to …show more content…
Being an African American born in Ghana and growing up in Alabama, Yaa Gyasi experienced the reality of people not knowing their family history or where they were actually from and the racism that is so deeply rooted in that part of the country. “... a little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn't name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness” (Kojo, Gyasi). This quote symbolizes the constant fear that African Americans were living under during the Jim Crow years and the fact they could do nothing about it. Many will disagree but I believe this to be a form a terrorism; it is the same fear that many of the people in the Middle East are living with now yet we still fail to address it in. Kojo was one of the people living under this constant fear. He built a family in Baltimore, marrying and having several children, so when the news that a law that would allow runaway slaves to be captured and sent back to their owners it was a very real concern for millions of African Americans. Sadly because of the racist Jim Crow laws his wife Anna, who at the time was pregnant, was taken one day without any warning leaving Kojo without a wife and Anna without any family. Her son H, then grew up with no
Generally, African history is taught as though it is very distant from the history that the majority finds to be the most important, teaching the slave trade as statistics; simply numbers, not real people. We learn of the hardship and torture people endured but without context into who these people were, because they were real people, it all means nothing. To counter this way of teaching, Gyasi does what schools do not and personalizes every character which brings the history to life, giving it meaning beyond simply numbers or words on a page, “When they sold Ness in 1796… Ness could remember reaching out for her mother, flailing her arms and kicking her legs, fighting against the body of the man who'd come to take her away” (Ness, Gyasi). Having previously established Ness as a character with a very complex history, we as readers already have a connection with her so when she is sold and forced to leave her mother as a child, it has a greater impact than reading that slaves were sold as children in some history textbook. Another aspect that is often overlooked and dismissed is the fact that Africa had more of an impact of the people of the imperialist countries of Europe than many would ever know, “That man came from the Cape Coast to …show more content…
Being an African American born in Ghana and growing up in Alabama, Yaa Gyasi experienced the reality of people not knowing their family history or where they were actually from and the racism that is so deeply rooted in that part of the country. “... a little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn't name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness” (Kojo, Gyasi). This quote symbolizes the constant fear that African Americans were living under during the Jim Crow years and the fact they could do nothing about it. Many will disagree but I believe this to be a form a terrorism; it is the same fear that many of the people in the Middle East are living with now yet we still fail to address it in. Kojo was one of the people living under this constant fear. He built a family in Baltimore, marrying and having several children, so when the news that a law that would allow runaway slaves to be captured and sent back to their owners it was a very real concern for millions of African Americans. Sadly because of the racist Jim Crow laws his wife Anna, who at the time was pregnant, was taken one day without any warning leaving Kojo without a wife and Anna without any family. Her son H, then grew up with no